Getting Started with the Internet of Things

Cuno Pfister

Published by

O'Reilly

ISBN

9781449393571

RRP

£18.99

Reviewed by

Jeremy Crump FBCS

Score

7 out of 10

This book aims to get you started with the internet of things in a very practical way indeed. It’s essentially a guide to how to set up your own prototype network using the open-source electronics platform Netduino Plus (which costs about £40 in the UK), the Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2010 development environment and free web service Pachube.

This is a very practical book. It doesn’t spend much time defining the internet of things. In his introduction, Pfister very briefly notes that there are ethical issues arising from the additional surveillance that the internet of things facilitates, but he does no more than flag them up.

The book is essentially in three sections. Part I explores the development environment, Part II gives instructions for how to set up Netduino Plus as an HTTP client and Part III as a server. It’s very much a recipe book, with plenty of C# code.

If you work through the book, you will understand the principles of controlling remote devices and sensors over the internet. You won’t be able to do much more than make Netduino’s LED flash, but you should in principle be able to create networks deploying other devices too.

What it doesn’t try to do is to describe how sensor networks have been constructed and deployed industrially. Nor does it concern itself with the business and social impact of this very exciting technology. The book gives a very hands-on experience to exemplify the principles that underpin sensor networks. This could be an excellent starting place for school and college projects, or for the hobbyist.